Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

What is an observability engineer? Is it your SIEM admin? How about your application performance monitoring admin? Neither? Both? Observability engineering is more than administering a tool. There is more to it than data onboarding, writing parsers, and getting data in. As an observability tool admin, you work with data producers and consumers to get data in a human-readable and searchable format from the source to the analytics system.

Network monitoring is ideal for getting a real-time view of your connected environment, and with reports, you can look back in time too. Logs are key to this rear-view mirror look, as they contain all the data for all the elements you are monitoring. But without network log archiving, you can only look back so far. Did you know that according to an IBM/Ponemon study, it takes an average of 287 days to discover and contain a data breach?

Synthetic monitoring can be one of the most powerful tools in your DevOps team’s toolkit, especially for the SRE, yet is one that is often overlooked by people building out a reliability mindset. Synthetic monitoring permits you to simulate any transaction or interaction users can have in your website or app, from places around the world, as often as you’d like.

If you’re wondering if that classic car you’ve been scoping out on Bring a Trailer or eBay Motors is as authentic as posited by the seller – specifically re: the common claims of “original paint” or “high quality respray” – you’re going to want to take a closer look around the edges. This is because a talented painter can make a second or 30th-hand vehicle look pretty snazzy with a well-affected, if not super high-quality, repaint.

This article is the final installment in a series that demystifies observability. The first three focused on the history of observability, dispelling myths around observability, and what observability is and what it can offer. In this last article of the series (Check out part 1), I want to offer a complete definition of observability.